There are a range of accessibility options built in, these include VoiceOver, Zoom, White on Black, Mono Audio, Speak Auto-text and Triple-click Home. Not had a chance to see what all these do but will do in due course.
The first advantage that comes to mind is that you can operate this device with one finger, there's no mouse, shift key etc. I suppose you could operate a laptop with one finger but it would be much more difficult.
One would imagine the intellectual capacity required to use this device would be less than that for operating a laptop given you simply touch what you want to make “go”, it's intuitive.
One of the main challenges I foresee is that the device is not tactile, i.e. how would a sight impaired person know if they were pressing the right spot on the screen? I suppose it may be possible to overlay some form of tactile material to help overcome this problem. Perhaps an area to research?
I'm sure there will be apps developed that are related to accessibility.
I have been using an app called Pressreader, you can view practically any newspaper from around the world and it has an amazingly good voice synthesizer built in so you can sit back and listen to the news being read out. I've also tried a US only app called Dictation from Dragon, voice to text, this also works really well.
Apple has built in a number of tools to help site impaired people and I would be really interested to see research or feedback from somebody in this group that has used the iPad. How do they get past the fact there's no tactile feedback and only a flat screen?
No doubt research into the opportunities of this device to help people with disabilities will come up with many different uses, after all there are many different disabilities with different assistive requirements.
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